Talk announcement – Robin Edgar – Dutch Pandemic Software – Building a FOSS Ecosystem for all

Robin, working as a consultant for many organisational structers and companies, will tell us all about how when the pandemic struck, the Netherlands was as unprepared as anyone in terms of being able to handle the crisis and was forced to act quickly. In the Netherlands, healthcare is organised decentrally and so finding out what was happening was a tricky priority. After building the registration, contract tracing and other systems for health regions it turned out there were exceptions. Many exceptions. How do you build systems designed for 100% population coverage? A whole ecosystem was set up from nothing at an incredibly rapid pace by the IT department of the Dutch Ministry of Health with a group of hackers, government officials, privacy and security specialists. This is a story about the ecosystem and the exceptions we ran into. How (and why) do you open source projects like this and where can you play with the software yourself.